Abstract
Converging evidence suggests an association between spatial and music domains. A cerebellar role in music-related information processing as well as in spatial-temporal tasks has been documented. Here, we investigated the cerebellar role in the association between spatial and musical domains, by testing performances in embodied (EMR) or abstract (AMR) mental rotation tasks of subjects listening Mozart Sonata K.448, which is reported to improve spatial-temporal reasoning, in the presence or in the absence of continuous theta burst stimulation (cTBS) of the left cerebellar hemisphere. In the absence of cerebellar cTBS, music listening did not influence either MR task, thus not revealing a “Mozart Effect”. Cerebellar cTBS applied before musical listening made subjects faster (P = 0.005) and less accurate (P = 0.005) in performing the EMR but not the AMR task. Thus, cerebellar inhibition by TBS unmasked the effect of musical listening on motor imagery. These data support a coupling between music listening and sensory-motor integration in cerebellar networks for embodied representations.
Highlights
Revealing the neural bases of music processing has become a central theme in cognitive neuroscience
Since in previous studies mental rotation tasks have been used to test for a correlation between spatial and musical abilities [16,17], in the present research we tested the performances in mental rotation (MR) tasks of healthy adult subjects passively listening Mozart’s Sonata K.448 in the presence or in the absence of continuous theta burst stimulation applied to the left cerebellar hemisphere
Since the nature of the stimulus to be rotated in the MR tasks seems to affect the implicit selection of a particular type of mental transformation [23,24], in the present study the mental rotation abilities were tested on two different MR tasks: one ‘‘embodied’’ (EMR, Embodied Mental Rotation) requiring to mentally rotate a schematic drawing of the human body from an egocentric point of view, and another ‘‘abstract’’ (AMR, Abstract Mental Rotation) requiring to mentally rotate non-representational figures without any affordance property
Summary
Revealing the neural bases of music processing has become a central theme in cognitive neuroscience. Since in previous studies mental rotation tasks have been used to test for a correlation between spatial and musical abilities [16,17], in the present research we tested the performances in mental rotation (MR) tasks of healthy adult subjects passively listening Mozart’s Sonata K.448 in the presence or in the absence of continuous theta burst stimulation (cTBS) applied to the left cerebellar hemisphere. Bilateral cerebellar activations have been observed in both musical [6] and mental rotation tasks [18], to transiently down-regulate the neuronal excitability [19,20] the cTBS was applied on the left hemisphere, because the activation of left lateral crus I is reported to be associated with the presentation of auditory stimuli [21,22] and during mental rotation tasks [10,15]. Since the nature of the stimulus to be rotated in the MR tasks (body vs. non-body parts) seems to affect the implicit selection of a particular type of mental transformation (i.e., egocentric or allocentric) [23,24], in the present study the mental rotation abilities were tested on two different MR tasks: one ‘‘embodied’’ (EMR, Embodied Mental Rotation) requiring to mentally rotate a schematic drawing of the human body from an egocentric point of view, and another ‘‘abstract’’ (AMR, Abstract Mental Rotation) requiring to mentally rotate non-representational figures without any affordance property
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